locked in with natalie

natalie is back! her son is out of hospital and spending some time with his grandmother in the country to recuperate. today was her second monday back at work, and as usual she was here early and finished on time. enid had already paid her, so was surprised when natalie called her, pointing at the door. it was locked, and there was no key to be seen.

once, there were two keys, but the man had lost his a couple of weeks before and not managed to find it. now there was just enid’s.

enid cast her mind back to that morning. the doorbell had rung. the man was eating pancakes for his breakfast, but had interrupted them to take stalin upstairs and shut him in the office. enid had unlocked the door and let natalie in. then she had made a cup of coffee for natalie, and tea for herself. by then, the man was back in the kitchen, finishing his pancakes. she’d said goodbye to him, taken her tea, and gone up to the office to work. and there she’d stayed for five hours, but for another coffee-making trip.

so, if she’d removed the key from the lock after she’d unlocked it to let natalie in and then lost it somewhere, either the door was locked at that point - in which case the man wouldn’t have been able to leave, or the door was unlocked, in which case it’d be unlocked now. the answer was obvious - she’d left the key where she always left it, the man had taken it, left and then locked her in.

she called him. no, he hadn’t got the key. it was her key, he’d never take it after that time she was annoyed with him for locking her in. (what if there’d been a fire, she’d asked, angrily.) enid explained her logic, but the man is, after all, a man, and what he heard was “blah blah it’s your fault blah blah.”

enid got a bit cross, and asked the man to have a look anyway.

he did so. “nope, can’t find it.”

“have you tried your briefcase?”

“uh, no, ok, i’ll look there... nope, not there either.”

“how about the car?”

“well, i suppose... i’ll go and look and call you back. but i’m sure i don’t have it - have you looked around the hall floor, it could have fallen out, and got swept aside or something.”

while the man went out to his car, enid decided she had to do something, so she may as well look for the man’s missing key. she went into every one of the man’s pockets, in trousers, coats and jackets, finding british money, a doctor’s receipt, some missing nail clippers, and, mysteriously, 4 CDs - but no keys.

the man called back. “it’s not in the car. it must be in the house, i don’t have it.”

“but you must have,” said enid, very cross by now. “it’s the only thing that makes sense. i always leave it hanging there - i never take it anywhere else. how did you get out if i took it?”

“i’ve got to go into a meeting now,” said the man. “i’ll come home afterwards, though i don’t see what good it will do.”

so natalie watched tv while enid searched all the suitcases, sock drawers and other junk collecting places of the house. still no key.

an hour later, the lift rattled and the man buzzed the intercom. enid rushed to the front door - which opened. “the key was in the outside,” said the man, sheepishly. “i must have locked it and left the key there. i did have a hangover.”

young enid

for fun monday, enid has looked through her old photos and found this one of her in the back garden with her father when she was about two. she doesn’t really like looking at it - seeing the past like this just makes her wistful. the enid child there on the lawn has life ahead of her; there are so many possibilities, so many things she might do, people she might marry, careers she might choose. back then, none of her wave functions had collapsed. but now, in 2007, there are just choices made, and not always good ones.

enid’s father is 73 now, and his features have been smudged by age. age does that - it takes people’s faces and rubs out the hard lines of youth leaving watercolour old people with just a wash of grey.

according to sally, enid’s dad is 53 (say). his friend fred, who's the same age, would also be 53 (say). this , to enid, shows a slight weakness in the system. suppose, enid thinks, we were actually as young as we feel - if we measured mind’s actual years by enid (maybe), then enid’s dad would be about 45 (maybe), which is a lot more accurate. enid's dad likes to travel to new countries (even molvania). he thinks you should keep living until you die. he does the times crossword every day, and although he says he’s not as good at it as he used to be, he still impresses enid, who can’t do crosswords at all and thinks she ought to learn before her brain rots.

in this system, fred would be 83 (maybe). fred bangs on about his poor health, the old days, and the number of immigrants mr blair is allowing into the country these days. fred never tries a new thing, or reads a new book. fred has nothing left to want.

but the best thing about maybe years is that they can reduce. take up a new hobby, make new friends, learn to do the crossword - and you can wipe ten years from your age (maybe).

p.s. enid would like a better acronym for maybe - if you have any suggestions, please let her know.

thursday

yesterday was a bad day. it had snowed on wednesday, then mostly melted overnight. stalin and fluffy’s morning walk was muddy, slippy and grumpy-making.

back at the flat, enid’s cable modem was blinking sadly at her - no interweb, no interweb, no interweb. enid called voila, her inaptly-named cable provider - neither french nor prone to deliver anything with the kind of speed and flair that demands a “voila!” voila said (to paraphrase) “you are a stupid girly and you know nothing about technology. reboot everything and phone us up to tell us it’s working again.”

enid did so, twice, but her message to voila remained that the modem wasn’t working.

finally voila actually bothered to look into the matter, and told enid that the workmen outside her house had cut through the cable. “we should get it going again today, in not then tomorrow maybe,” they promised, with the kind of dedication to service that got molvania where it is today.

of course this had to happen on the very day that everyone in enid’s company in london was in a big offsite meeting and she had chance to work on the server. enid would like to meet that mr. sod who invented the law of bad things happening when they have most impact, and shake him warmly by the throat.

enid called the man and begged to share his office space. he, being a very nice man, threw some people out of a meeting room and invited her in: enid was saved. she worked hard, and in a couple of hours had managed to achieve what she’d expected to take all day. sometimes computers go right - it’s good to remember that when so often they don’t.

the man suggested lunch. although enid doesn’t usually do lunch, today she was celebrating success snatched from the jaws of failure - and the man had mentioned titanic, supposed to be one of the poshest restaurants in kernib. enid should have learnt her posh-restaurant-in-eastern-europe lesson by now, but she hadn’t.

they stepped inside the restaurant; their coats were whisked away from them. titanic was expensive-looking in that versailles-meets-brothel kind of way that should have made them run for the local pelmeni shop... but it was too late.

they ordered israeli wine; the georgian saperavi, their usual standby, was almost as expensive.

the menu was the usual blend of “european” and “japanese”. enid does not use quotation marks lightly; she means them. no european would recognize “baltimore veal stake* with blue cheese and pineapple souse*”. no native of osaka would choose the man’s starter of assorted spicy sushi - an exotic fusion of japanese-style raw fish mixed with molvanian mayonnaise on nori-wrapped rice pudding.

enid’s pumpkin soup was pretty much exactly as she makes it herself at home - therefore tasty (she claims modestly) but not very exciting.

if every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the same is not true of kernib high dining. every posh restaurant is bad in exactly the same way - expensive fixtures and fittings, service that's too formal and at the same time inadequate, poor food that is a very odd blend of molvanian and japanese. enid's advice is this: if you open your menu in a molvanian restaurant and see sushi on it, run and hide.

on the other hand, when they are bad, cheap restaurants are bad in very different ways - one might a huge menu of which nothing is actually available, another will char its meat to a black cinder, and yet a third will make enid very ill indeed. but most cheap restaurants are actually quite good - something that can only be said for a tiny minority of the expensive ones.

enid and the man had finished their starters a long time before a waiter came up and told them that their main dishes were delayed and would arrive in seven minutes. his precision motivated the man to start his watch's timer function. after twenty-seven minutes enid and tm had finished their bottle of wine, and ordered two more glasses. at last, after thirty-seven minutes, their fish arrived. bread-crumbed and served with a lemon slice and parsley, it wasn’t exactly 4 star dining. both enid and the man had forgotten to order a garnish (molvanian for vegetables and carbohydrate) so their mains sat sadly alone in the centre of their vast white plates.

the bill came promptly: £90.

what a titanic mistake.

*these were actual spelling mistakes on the actual menu in one of the best restaurants in town. haven’t they considered giving one of the no hoper brits in o’briens a free meal in return for correcting their menu?

realtors really can't rite

enid is reading a lot of so-called english written by realtors at the moment. (realtors, for anyone as out of touch with modern american culture as enid is, are estate agents.)

she finds it quite amusing that most of the houses have dinning rooms. presumably that’s because the city streets are so noisy.

then there was the one with the "Elegant Lge Master Suit on Uppr Level". presumably a nice pinstripe, stored in an "Elegant Lge Master Closet".

this morning, enid read the best one yet: “Large sunny bat has a fully installed PureEarth Technologies Inc. whole house water filtration system.” enid wonders how you would install a whole house water filtration system in a bat, even if it were a large and sunny one.

enid and the false leg

after banging on a bit about men’s dangly bits, enid seems to be moving on to a new obsession with unidexters.

when enid was about ten, and her brother eric about seven, their great auntie hilda and great uncle sydney came to stay. uncle sydney was a source of great curiosity because he had only one leg. obviously originally he had had two, like everyone else, but his left one was attacked by germans in the war and had to be removed. eric and enid were fascinated by the missing leg, and even more by its replacement, the false leg. what was it like, enid wondered? was it fully jointed, like a doll? plastic or ceramic? did it have toes? did it even have a foot? was a sock painted on, to save time in dressing?

finally, enid could withstand her curiosity no longer. early one morning, she rallied her troops. in the half-light, she nudged open the door of the spare room, hid behind it and sent her brother crawling into the room, directing him with whispered commands: “go on, it’s there, behind the bed.” “further!” “grab it, quickly!”

at which point they were discovered, and false leg-based antics were put a stop to for good.

to this day, enid’s parents laugh about how enid sent her poor little brother into the fray while avoiding danger herself. she likes to claim it shows early management potential, but is concerned that it’s actually prurient curiosity, combined with cowardice and low moral standards. oh, hang on, perhaps that is management potential.

dog removal

this morning enid got a quote for shipping* stalin and fluffy to san francisco, and she is in shock, because it was $4,560. enid presumes that for that much cash, the dogs get to lie on goose down beds, sip a little slightly sparkling mineral water and dine on fresh game and truffles. perhaps they even get shipped* in their own private jet.

enid pointed out to the man that if they left stalin and fluffy in molvania, they could buy at least eight new puppies for that once they arrived. rather worryingly, the man immediately started discussing how stalin would manage to fend for himself on the streets of kernib, and could he have one of those cute goldendoodles?

(the consensus was that stalin wouldn’t manage very well as a street dog. he’s smart, but not smart enough not to menace small children out of their hot dogs. enid thinks he’d see the inside of a van with bars in no time.)

enid is now searching for a cheaper dog remover.

*enid thinks it’s funny we say “shipping” when we mean “aeroplaning”.

third-person singular

most people who find this site from google are not looking for enid (poo) but for “what is the third-person singular” or “a sentence in the third-person singular”. enid suspects that they are american school children, or british ones who stay up very late at night, and she’s sorry to disappoint them in their search for enlightenment on the subject of english grammar. (she knows she’s disappointed them, because they visit her for an average of zero seconds - not even long enough to put the kettle on.) as enid is english herself, and hence knows all about the language, she thought she’d write a small entry for her childish visitors to help them with their homework.

ahem.

english has three people: first, second and third. it also has three cases: vanilla, singular and spectacular. (enid is putting them in their usual ordering here - how ever your teacher may prefer the manchester method, in which singular is given last, and always written in bold.)

let’s do the easy one first:

the first-person vanilla is bus driver, the second- is nurse and the third- is school teacher. you can see that these are ordinary, everyday professions, hence the term vanilla, like ice-cream. (english used to have a third-person chocolate, but it became a rather fat third person, and had to go back to plain ice-cream, or even frozen yoghurt.)

spectacular, on the other hand, is reserved for royalty, and in truth should never be spoken aloud by a commoner. there is still a statute in english law that says “he who pronounces people spectacular, less it be within ye lenten period, or he of noble blood, shall be taken to ye tower and there lambasted with ye grammar until his ears shall bleed.” enid will take the risk on your behalf, children, even though it’s not lent: the first-person spectacular is the queen, the second-person spectacular is prince charles, and the third- is prince william.

now what you’ve been googling for - the people singular. these, as you can perhaps guess by now, are unidexters (look it up). the first-person singular is douglas bader, the second-person singular is heather mccartney, and the third-person singular is peter cook. (for bonus points, tell your teacher that peter cook is not actually a unidexter, but was awarded the third-person singular by queen victoria for first using this term to refer to people with one leg.)

seriously, if you were looking for a sentence in the third person singular, then enid suggests you try this one: “a student who finagles deserves to be eviscerated with an agricultural implement.”

on the agenda

the man has just sent out an agenda for his weekly executive meeting (called execpulse - blurgh). the agenda started thus:

NATIONAL ANTHEM
To be played on the pipe organ (all stand)

and finished thus:

AOB

Review of new actions (Jeff) – 2 min

COFFEE AND BISCUITS
Lemon thins hand baked by Jeff (Jeff)

enid thinks that every meeting should end with biscuits. her choice would be squashed fly, if they still make them.

tagged!

enid is very chuffed this evening because she’s no longer a tag virgin. yes, she’s been tagged by sally, who writes wise words about life with five husbands and a child (or was it the other way round?) enid’s fairly new to this blogging business, so she thinks it will be easy to tell you five things that you didn’t already know.

sally was inspired by babies. enid will try to be inspired by someone who looks very like a baby... the man.

(one) you might have guessed from that introduction that the man is very bald. the poor thing has been that way since the age of 21. when enid first met the man, he was just as bald but had a long, curly pony tail. with huge forbearance, enid did not comment on the disgustingness of same. luckily, the man looked in a mirror one day and decided enid should cut the offending article off. once she’d done so, he put it in a large brown envelope, and sent it to his mother - who was convinced he’d been kidnapped, and wondered where the ransom note was.

(two) enid and the man were married in 1997. they had a very small wedding, with just their family, promising their friends a big party when (if) they reached their tenth wedding anniversary. after all, they said, any old fool can stand in front of a registrar - it takes perseverance to last for that amount of time. well, in a couple of months, enid and the man will have been married for ten lon-, uh, wonderful years. (enid thinks it’s pretty safe to say this. even if she started divorce proceedings now, she doesn’t think they’d have completed by march 1st.) enid, the man and their bank are hoping that none of their friends remember this promise.

(three) enid had another boyfriend, angus, when she met the man. after she dumped angus (quite kindly, she thinks), he found out about the man, and wasn’t best pleased. one night, as enid and the man left the pub, they saw angus’s car outside, and angus inside it. the man walked across the car park towards home, while enid hung back, timidly. angus started his car, revved the engine, and drove straight for the man, who had to jump onto the bonnet and run over the roof to escape. (a few weeks later angus forgave them both, and they are all friends again now.)

(four) the man has the largest collection of music of any entity enid has ever known, including itunes. there are several albums that he has bought twice, forgetting that he’s already got them in his collection.

(five) only today, the man sent enid a love pome. (she thinks he was trying to cheer her up after the awful corporate night out.) it was the first pome she’s ever had from him that didn’t start “hippedy pippedy pop”.

(six) and since she’s just been nice to the man there, enid thinks she’ll show him up. one day at work, enid and the man were discussing expenses with their boss. “hey,” asked the man, “what does the ‘m’ in ‘per diem’ stand for?”

enid would like to tag her old chums stephen and annette of abu dhabbling. she thinks it’s only fair if they do five things each.

corporate dinner

enid doesn’t like them. no, really, she doesn’t like them at all - they don’t seem to be the place to meet interesting people, have a good intellectual discussion, or be silly and have a laugh, but rather to posture and pose.

yesterday’s visitor’s real name was dick; he must have had remarkably perceptive parents. dick is the millionaire ceo of a huge american company, and has about 43 big screen plasma tvs, which he described in detail - their sizes, their pixel resolution, their hd-readiness. then he moved onto his pool house, its fridge, its plasma tv, and the number of square feet it is in area.

“that’s bigger than my flat,” said enid, who had no idea if it was really because her flat is metric.

to be fair to the people from the man’s company, she didn’t think they enjoyed the stream of consciousness boasting either. tim, next to enid, pointed out that he had much higher resolution pictures in his house - he called it a book. bevin insisted on calling the pool house “the tool house”. considering that the man’s company was supposed to be giving this visitor the red carpet, enid was refreshed by everyone’s frankness.

there was little to do but concentrate on the food and wine. enid ate too much of the former and drank too much of the latter. her main course was a dish of bull’s testicles (don’t worry, although testicles seem to be becoming a theme of this blog, enid assures you that she isn’t obsessed by them). when it arrived, the gonads were surprisingly small in diameter.

“are those really from a bull?” she asked.

“hmm,” replied tim. “in that bullfight, it looks as if the bull won.”